


The Harder Job

by redtoes



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Epitaph 3, Gen, Post-Season 2, What happens after Topher fixes the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 14:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redtoes/pseuds/redtoes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adelle has the harder job...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Harder Job

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing except a morbid fascination with what happens the day after the "happy" ending

_Of course, the tech is already out there. The mythical happy ending is just that, mythical. Can you imagine the social ramifications of an entire population losing their minds?_  
   
Adelle tries not to think too hard as she guides the former blank slates through the remnants of downtown LA and its pulse-shocked population.  
  
Most of the people they pass are huddled in on themselves crying - had they been butchers or blanks?  Did it matter?  Would it really make that much of a difference to someone who's just woken up to the fall of humanity as to how exactly it was they'd missed the party?  Not that they'd remember.  She dearly hopes they won’t remember.  
   
She wonders idly how many of these broken people will return to the scattered wreckage that had once been their homes and quietly open their veins.  Survival in body doesn't mean survival in soul.  And there were bound to be those who can’t handle the truth of their missing years in this brave new world.  
   
Choosing death.  Like Topher.  Dead.  
  
By his own choice and his own hand but dead all the same. The genius of Christopher Brink gone from the world, and for what?  Guilt?  Peace?  Some fleeting moment of justice?  Whatever it was she hoped he’d found it.  She hoped it was more than just the easier job he had volunteered for.  
   
It was all hyperbole of course, yes, Topher had his fingerprints on the tech that ended the world but so had so many others. There are times in history when technology just appears, growing in the collective consciousness from seeds of past discoveries.  And that which is discovered by one mind can eventually be discovered by another.  The telephone.  Electricity.  Victorian rivalry leading to un-gentlemanly squabbles in the patent office.  
  
Trying to explain this to Topher even in the first days after they left Tucson was impossible.  His grief over Bennett, and to a certain degree Boyd, mixed with his genius’ guilt and the weight of the sole credit his ego forced upon him was too much to bear even then.  
  
They'd returned to the LA house seeking a next step, a next move, the next battle or skirmish in the war with Rossum.  They'd brought down the founders, the remote tech, the weaponised tech, but there were still 22 other houses out there on the planet.  Echo’s determination to leave no one behind was exhausting.  
   
Adelle wanted time to breathe, to pause and collect herself.  The house would have to be secured, the attic opened, and what to do with the imitable Mr Dominic?  The pressures of day-to-day existence threatened to overwhelm her - victory or no, they needed to make decisions about what to do tomorrow.  
   
Same as now really.  
   
Adelle looks up past broken buildings at a clear blue California sky.  A landscape like this should be seen only in darkness or twilight a darkly dramatic side of her whispers. Sunshine does not befit it.  
   
A memory of cloud watching on the school fields popped into her consciousness. Knee high socks and ugly shoes. Straw hats in the summer that poked at your scalp like witches fingernails.  Eating berries from brambles. Reading books under the covers by torchlight.  
   
She'd never been in danger of remembering her childhood as idyllic before.  Memories of boarding school bullies, the constant loneliness and the abrupt awareness that she'd been sent away more because she was not wanted at home than any family tradition had soured the entire experience.  But the cloud watching had been nice.  Pleasant, even.  
  
A longing for a simpler time.  An easier job.  
  
The first step was to decide where to go.  The twenty young people in dollhouse yoga outfits stand around nervously, wrapping their arms around materials too thin to be worn outside.   
  
She never would have considered Alpha to have a sense of humour, but the overwhelming irony of the man running a house was almost too much to bear.  He’d even dressed them as they had done him.  Adelle wonders for a second if he’d picked out the outfits himself – he certainly hadn’t had a wardrobe team to help him.  
  
Zone – and what sort of name was that for a young man - waves a hand, indicating the ten year old at his side.  
  
“We need to find food.”  
  
“Indeed,” Adelle pauses, considering.  Just how bad had the surface been in the years since her small team of survivors has struck out for Safe Haven, what food sources might remain?  
  
Rossum had seemingly crumbled after the devastation visited upon their Tucson headquarters, but you either kill the beast or leave it alone.  Wounding it only made it come back stronger.  
  
The dollhouses continued.  
  
The head of the snake cut off, the body had morphed lizard-like into smaller entities, each re-growing their own tail and continuing on without the emails from head office or corporate guidelines.  
  
The fight continued.  
  
And then it stopped.  Or at least changed, the battle shifting into the all encompassing need for protection against identity-stealing pulses  
  
Adelle tilts her head.  How long has it been since that first fateful pulse?  How long was the world in chaos?   
  
She remembers clearly the past years out on the farm, but that time spent locked in her own dollhouse is bleary, without the measuring influence of sunlight just how long had they been out of touch?  
  
Food is the priority – the dollhouse had had food but she’d not thought to bring any with her.   
  
She suspects Zone’s backpack shelters cans, but to lay the weight of feeding 20 on one man’s shoulders seems unfair.  Nevermind that it already lays on hers.  
  
“Food,” she says, “and shelter.”  The basic necessities.  
  
Tomorrow she’ll look for figures of authority – seek out any of the old guard returned to claim their posts abandoned.  Local government or law enforcement, how many will stand up as what they once were and seek to shape this new world?  How many will cower where they lay or give in to the temptation of the darkness?  
  
Maybe she shouldn’t judge – very few have been lucky enough (so to speak) to be conscious these past years.  The weight of unknown actions must be at least as heavy as actual memories.   
  
Tomorrow she’ll walk down these streets to city hall and see what remains.  
  
But for now the priority is food and shelter.  Warmer clothes for her recovering charges.  Identification of who each one is and where they might wish to go.   
  
Planning for tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.  Planning for all those days until she can return to her surrogate grandchild and her former charges.  Family is a word they purposely avoid, but the truth of it is written deeper than the name.  
  
The world is likely full of former dolls without places to hide, now wiped back to that which they were.  She wonders what they think of it all – how many of them might have lived under the radar and have lost precious memories to Topher’s cure…  
  
But those are thoughts for tomorrow.  
  
Adelle calls out to the group, corralling them with softly voiced commands, tasking Zone and the child - what is her name now she is returned to herself – to walk with her, leading the way through today, towards tomorrow.


End file.
